Sites I've referenced in the posts of Dragon Writing Prompts.
Name generators
- Kleimo’s Random Name Generator
Generates names (first and last) from US Census data. You can set an "obscurity" factor to generate names that sound more common or names that sound unique.
Other generators
- Clifty WebWorks Scripts: Random Sentence Generator
Generates random sentences such as "Faculty advisors hope to be hired as game show hosts." - They Fight Crime
Generates pairs of crime fighters such as "He's a scrappy Jewish barbarian ... She's a plucky belly-dancing Valkyrie." - Modern Story Starter
Just click on “Start the Modern Story Starter” button. Wish they were more fantasy based! But the idea is neat. - Nonsense paragraph generator
Almost sounds like there's a story there. Click "again" to generate more nonsense. - The Not My Desk New Food Dire Warning And/Or Healthful Revelation Generator
Randomly generates "dire" food warnings and discoveries. (Used in Foods flash.) - Random Writing Prompts
Glen and Karen Bledsoe are children's book authors. There are three generators on the page: adjective, noun, verb triples, 3 objects, random plot. - Serendipitous Oxymoron Creator
Generates pairs of words that seem to clash like "fabulous crisis" and "tyranical perfection". (Used in Oxymorons.) - Story Generator
Generates story ideas, giving you characters, a setting and a plot element. There are options for fantasy and science fiction. An example is: "The story is about a naive bard, a tactless knight, and a watchman. It takes place in a coliseum. The story ends with an apocalyptic event. An impending magical conflux plays an important role." - Writing Fix
Excellent site. Huge collection of writing prompts for right brained and left brained writers. The newest is the Serendipitous Story Theme Creator where you can create ideas such as "Courage occasionally scars the heart," "Friendship totally takes its toll," "Failure slowly is forgotten." (As with most of their generators, each part of the prompt can be individually generated so if you find part you like, you can generate new other parts until you find a total prompt you like.)
Writing prompts
- Free Writing Prompts
From Writer's Digest. Pretty much a motherload of prompts. - Rhizomatic Writing
Some very creative exercise here. Rhizomatic models are described as "They explore, wander, play around, feed words into machines to see what will come out. They come out where you may least expect them to." (Used in If-then inspired by their Logic exceeded model.)
- Adopt-a-plot
Folder at National Novel Writing Month website's message boards where writers post plots they won't be using. - Big List of RPG Plots by
S. John Ross
Huge list of plots and subplots, well categorized. Presented for RPG game masters, but useful for writers, too. - Facade
Offers free readings for Tarot, I-Ching, Rune, Bibliomancy and many others. - Top 10 Tabloid Headlines
From The City Newsstand’s (a newsstand/bookstore in Chicago) list updated each month. They go all the way back to January 1998. - Opening Hooks
Categorized list of opening lines. Coming in January (2006) he says. I keep checking! (Referenced in First lines.) - Bert Christensen’s sniglet's page
Bert's list of "words that should exist but don't." (Used in Sniglets.) - Peter Anspach’s Evil Overlord list
What evil overlords should and shouldn't do to avoid the mistakes of their movie counterparts. In a similar vein: Evil rulers, If I Ever Become a Dragonball Character…, If I Ever Become an Anime Character….. (Used in Peter Anspach’s Evil Overlord list.) - 365, Volume 1: 365 Character Questions for Writers and Roleplayers by Heather Grove
Just as it says: 365 questions to dig into the background, psyche and make up of your character. (Used in Character questionnaire.)
- Flickr
Photo archive. You can type in a keyword (tag) and turn up pictures that match it. There is also an advanced search feature to match multiple tags. - Behind the name
a site with good name origins. Also has a translator that shows you the name in other nationalities, a name generator drawing from its national and historic database, list of names by meaning. - Free dictionary
offers quite a bit of information and a pretty good thesaurus. Also lists phrases. - Wiktionary
Wikipedia's dictionary. Since it's written by everyone, some entries are more fleshed out that others but can have some surprising information, like foreign equivalents. - Visual Thesaurus
It’s a program/subscription but you can try it out a limited number of times for free. After you type in a word you can click on any of the words in the map and it will put that at the center with related words around it. Very cool!
- Burning Void
Articles on developing characters and plots for role playing games — the game masters have to come up with a lot of them in a short amount of time! But the ideas are easily adaptable to writing. - The Bus to Inspiration
A good article at The Writer’s E-Zine about creating creative people sketches. - Using Tarot Spreads to Create Characters
Article with spreads specifically for creating characters and plots
Websites where you can interact with other writers
- subeta
a site for writen roleplaying centered around fantasy pets and anthro characters. (Described in Subeta roleplaying for writers.)
